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Idle Hands is a very late-90s stoner comedy... horror movie. This turns out not to be a winning combination of genres. It works, as both, but the audience is the overlap of a Venn diagram instead of both circles. It's a stoner movie you absolutely should not watch while stoned.
It's also packed with now-recognizable names. Seth Green, Jessica Alba, Vivica Fox, Devon Sawa, Elden Henson.
Absolutely bombed.
There’s a ton of great horror-comedies (great if you’re in to that kind of thing anyway)
And Idle Hands is one of them.
Horror and comedy can blend perfectly because both are built on releasing tension through shock. It's why Evil Dead 2 works so well.
But not all subgenres have compatible audiences. Combining a cartoon sitcom with torture porn to get Jigsaw Squarepants could work, technically, but it wouldn't be a peanut butter and chocolate scenario. Idle Hands effectively meshes Can't Hardly Wait with Donnie Darko and finds the crossover demographics are not enough to recoup a $10M budget. And they spent $25M to find that out.
Still, great stupid movie, if you're into both ingredients. The circular saw. The cops. The bagel slicer. I'm just glad someone else remembers the damn thing, because its cultural impact seems limited to filling those kids' rolodexes.